One main difference between x11 and wayland is that in x11 all applications receive all input whereas in wayland the compositor receives input and decides which application may receive it.
This causes a major issue with application which need input grab for running or showing a nested desktop. This affects e.g. GUI virtual machines (SPICE clients), RDP clients, VNC clients, nested kwin/gnome-shell/whatever. See also: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1285770 . Games might also be affected, I don't know.
I'm posting this here to raise attention because
1. to fix this we need another protocol (extension)
2. this issue can't be fixed in a single application, it needs the whole stack (wayland library, compositors, affected applications) to change
Compared to the other bugs in "WaylandRelated" lists [1] [2], these bugs need architecture design, not just fixing bugs in one package.
I don't know whether this mailing list is the right place to discuss an issue like this. If you know better, please tell me.
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=1277927&hide_resolv...
[2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=757579&hide_resolved=1

Hi,
Currently we have coredumpctl installed by default, but it doesn't work
because core dumps are consumed by ABRT instead. I'd like to get
coredumpctl working out-of-the-box. We can do this by changing our
systemd presets [1] to disable abrt-ccpp.service.
ABRT will continue to function thanks to the ABRT developers' work on
coredumpctl integration via abrt-vmcore.service. There is a somewhat-
reduced feature set, but I've been running this for several months
happily and I haven't noticed any issues; my crashes are being reported
to FAF, and I can manually report to Bugzilla. See [2] for details.
This might be slightly controversial for two reasons. First, the big
change here is that core dumps will appear in the magical and super-
awesome coredumpctl tool in addition to ABRT, but would no longer be
created in the cwd when ulimit is set appropriately (we would need to
feature that in the release notes). This aligns us with upstream
systemd behavior, but diverges from Debian and Ubuntu, which still
create the old-style coredumps in the cwd. Second, my understanding is
that the ABRT developers prefer to improve abrt-cli and tell people to
use that rather than coredumpctl. But as coredumpctl is very mature
(nicer) and cross-distro so it gets many more contributors, I
definitely prefer to instruct people to use coredumpctl instead for
C/C++ crashes.
We could totally do this change for F24 as well as it should be just a
one-line change, but in the spirit of beta freeze I figure it's
probably best left for F25.
Michael
[1] https://pagure.io/fedora-release/blob/master/f/90-default.preset
[2] https://github.com/abrt/abrt/issues/1108

Hi,
Recently the Workstation working group agreed to match the GNOME apps
we install by default in Fedora with upstream GNOME's core apps. We
will by default sync our default apps to upstream's, and make
exceptions only for exceptional reasons if when proposed on this list.
This adds a bit more cement to our status as the best GNOME
distribution with minimal divergence from upstream.
I worked upstream with designers and release team to move many
desirable apps into core, to better match what we're currently shipping
in Fedora. I also created a gnome-incubator metamodule upstream, which
is where we'll put apps that we want to be core apps by design, but
which we recognize are not yet ready to be installed by default in
distributions. Currently that is home to bijiben, gnome-boxes, gnome-
calendar, gnome-dictionary, gnome-music, and gnome-photos.
Here is how we currently diverge from the new upstream recommendations:
Apps missing from Fedora: epiphany, gnome-logs
Extra apps in Fedora: bijiben, evolution, gnome-boxes, shotwell, rhythmbox
I see little value in discussing Epiphany again right now. Let's make an exception for that.
I have added Logs in Fedora just now, as I expect that will be uncontroversial and I don't see any value in diverging from upstream here.
Bijiben is just not very good yet, and it's not under active
development. There's no good reason for us to diverge from upstream
here, and I expect it will be uncontroversial, so I've dropped it.
I guess Evolution might be controversial; I use it religiously, and
many of you probably do too. But the user interface is complex and
confusing; users should not be exposed to this by default, barring
drastic UI changes that are outside the scope of the Evolution project.
Evolution is a great mail client for power users, but I'm confident
that the average user will be better off with webmail services; folks
who want a desktop client can simply install one, after all. We intend
to replace it with GNOME Mail eventually, but nobody has started
developing it yet. I propose we drop Evolution, but I have not done so
yet, pending further discussion.
Boxes has too many serious bugs right now, so it cannot go into gnome-
core yet, but we intend it to eventually. Since this is a significant
application, I have not yet removed it from our default install,
pending further discussion. My main concern is that it would look odd
for us to remove such a significant app from the default install, then
bring it back in a year or two. On the other hand, users won't notice a
thing unless they make a habit of reinstalling Fedora, and it's not
good to include apps we can't fully recommend. It's not clear to me
what choice is best here.
I propose we make temporary exceptions to keep Shotwell and Rhythmbox, until their intended replacements, Photos and Music, move into
upstream's GNOME core moduleset. That will very likely happen for
Photos for F25. I'm less certain about Music.
Michael

I wanted to check on Workstation Working Group members' availability
for our meeting time. Our current time, 10:00am Eastern on biweekly
Wednesdays, has worked fairly well. However, Michael can't make it
for the foreseeable future. In some groups it might be odd to look at
times for just one person, but he's a very active contributor to the
WG so it makes sense to do here. :-)
I posted this WhenIsGood for WG members to answer:
http://whenisgood.net/workstation-wg-2016
Please visit this by the end of the week. I'll take a look and post
results next Tuesday.
--
Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/
gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
The open source story continues to grow: http://opensource.com

I'd like to know whether there are plans to make wayland default in F25. I'm asking because there was no change proposed for this¹, although Fedora Magazine is stating it will become default in F25².
I know that there have been some considerations on this before³ and some places where issues are collected⁴.
Still, the wiki page is missing some important stuff:
How do we handle the fact that even XWayland applications cannot be started as root?
I'm ok with dropping the "feature" of starting GUI applications as root, but this might need some discussion and will need some communication. Please note that this would drop any support for at least a dozen applications such as GParted or grub-customizer.
And, as Kamil Paral stated on the december thread:
> I think we're going to get much worse publicity with this than primary selection. Inexperienced Linux users are used to run "sudo gedit", because terminal editors are unfriendly. Even I, with my years of experience, use "sudo meld" to merge configuration files, because I don't want to learn vimdiff, and graphical apps can simply offer a much superior experience. There was a discussion on devel list about this and everybody talked why running root gui apps is unsafe on X11, but nobody explained why it is unsafe on Wayland. Polkit and fine-grained permissions were proposed, which is a good idea, but it's not going to solve all use cases and it's not the current state of things in many apps. So unless there's a very good reason for deviating from current common practices, I'd put this onto "needs to be fixed" list. The more things we break without a really good reason, the more pushback we're going to get. Maybe this can be improved gradually over time?
This point should at least be noted on the wiki list. Can someone please add it?
Accessibility is pretty much unusable on wayland right now.
The wiki page lets me assume that nobody really worked on this besides some minor bug fixings. Can we disable wayland for people relying on a11y? If not, shipping wayland by default probably is a bad idea.
Virtual machine and remote desktop software:
Currently, it is impossible for remote desktop and virtual machine GUIs (both under XWayland and Wayland) to grab keys. This is a major regression for all users of these pieces of software.⁵ This point is completely missing on the wiki page. Can someone please add it?
Stability:
There are more crashers in gnome-shell with wayland than with X11. That's probably ok, but still worth considering.
Drivers:
Lastly, I don't know anything about support with non-Intel GPUs, because their drivers (especially proprietary ones) used to mess up pretty much last time I used them.
¹ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/25/ChangeSet
² https://fedoramagazine.org/whats-new-fedora-24-workstation/
³ See e.g:
* "Plan to organize the Wayland-by-default effort" in late 2015, https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/desktop@lists.fedoraproject...
* "Wayland blockers for F24 default" in februar, https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/desktop@lists.fedoraproject...
⁴ See
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=WaylandRelatedhttps://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=WaylandRelated and https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=waylandhttps://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Wayland_features
⁵ https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97333 and https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1285770

Hi,
We should all read today's featured Ars article:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/fedora-24-review-th...
There's a few inaccuracies, but no more than normal for distro reviews.
It's good feedback at any rate.
Highlights:
* Author plainly states that he thinks Fedora is better than Ubuntu
and Mint
* Author thinks we released too soon, should have waited for a kernel
upgrade. (I don't think it makes sense to consider the kernel in the
schedule....)
* Author mentions the Skylake fiasco in recommending that users wait a
couple months before updating to the new release; familiar suggestions
that our distro is unstable. In a sense it's Intel's fault for the bad
update, but other distros did not ship this broken update. This could
probably have been avoided if our update system was more conservative.
It's nuts that we have important packages going from testing to stable
in less than a day and we should fix this.
* Author praised GNOME Photos and GNOME Calendar... even though
they're not installed by default. (Let's change that!) He also praised
Maps.
* Author says Flatpak support in Software is still unstable. That's
being worked on.
* Author is disappointed that Flatpaks don't use the system fontconfig
settings, says it makes Flatpak apps look inconsistent.
* Author heaped praise on the new font settings. He didn't notice the
changes that went into Freetype, though, so GNOME got perhaps more
praise than deserved, but I can live with that. ;)
* Author is also pleased with QGnomePlatform
Some inaccuracies I found:
* Author dinged us for not having Chromium, but we do have Chromium in
our repos. It's because it (presumably) has no appdata file, so it
doesn't appear in Software. Who wants to fix it?
* Author dinged us for not having VLC, but this is really unfair; he's
probably not aware of the legal issues.
* Author doesn't realize that our graphical upgrades are already
working for F23 -> F24, suggests users must wait until F25 to see how
well the upgrade works.
* Author thinks the PackageKit command-not-found helper we've had for
years is new and related to dnf.
* Author thinks spins are variants of WorkStation... and somehow
decided to camel-case our name
* Author thinks we're on an eight-month release cycle (sad!)
Michael

Hi all,
I just wanted to bring this bug to your attention:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1295031
The tl;dr is that file previews in nautilius (aka sushi) will not work on
Wayland, and thus will be broken by default in F25.
We have two options going forward, we can either do one of those, or both:
1) We can patch sushi in Fedora to use the X11 backend (and thus XWayland),
as suggested in one of the upstream bugs. I'm not sure if this will work
since I don't have time to test this at the moment, but it might "fix" the
problem, at least in the short term.
2) We can remove sushi from our default installation. Shipping something
that will just crash when used with our defaults (ie. Wayland) doesn't make
much sense and it's probably violating our final release criteria that says
default applications must work as expected.
I hope I'll have time to test if "solution" #1 works soon and report the
result.
Anyway, I think the WG should decide what will happen to this package.
--
-Elad.

Hey folks!
We were just chewing over the Wayland-by-default Change and Fedora 25
status in the QA meeting. That led me to realize maybe this needs
emphasizing:
Alpha go/no-go (after the initial slip) is Thursday. We will be trying
to cut the Alpha RC today or tomorrow. Right now, *Wayland will be the
default* in any Alpha compose, because that's the state of things in
the 'stable' repo right now.
If you *don't* want Wayland to be default in Alpha you need to take
action right away. Wednesday is too late - unless we find blocking
issues in the RC compose and have to slip again, which you shouldn't
rely on.
If you want Wayland not to be default in Alpha, you need to file a bug
and propose it as either a blocker or a freeze exception issue
immediately, and submit an update that changes the default and mark it
as fixing the bug. Please ask me or any other person involved in the
blocker process if you need help on doing that.
If no blocker/FE bug is filed, Wayland will be the default in Alpha.